They Left Us Everything (3 page)

I hear soft slippers on the back staircase. Our kindly Tibetan caregivers, Pelmo and Tashi, who’ve been with us for over a decade, still live in the three-room apartment we created at the back of the house when Dad got Alzheimer’s. They’ve dedicated part of their space as a shrine to the Dalai Lama. His Holiness peers down from a gigantic poster, surrounded by plastic flowers, incense, and gold-fringed banners.

Pelmo comes down to say hello. She’s slim and graceful in a simple dark shirt and trousers, her long black hair parted in the middle and caught in a bun at the nape of her neck. I’m hoping to have a conversation with her about her hours: she
starts work earlier now, to attend to Mum’s personal care, so by three in the afternoon, she’s already worked a seven-hour shift. I want to make sure she’s properly paid and gets enough time off.

“How can we make mealtimes easier?” I ask Pelmo. “Should we try ordering Meals on Wheels?”

“Don’t talk about me as if I’m not here!” says Mum. “I don’t need food. I’ve got a freezer full of chicken.”

I open her freezer and survey all the unidentified plastic tubs. Each one holds a congealed mass. “Pelmo, this all has freezer burn—you need to throw it away!”

Pelmo’s eyebrows shoot up and she looks to Mum. “Pelmo does not throw my food away!” says Mum. “This is
my
kitchen!”

“Sorry … sorry …” says Pelmo. “I go upstairs.”

As she’s leaving, Mum says to me, “You don’t understand how horrible it is having
strangers
living in my house!”

Pelmo and Tashi are hardly strangers; in fact, I consider them saints. Later I catch Pelmo in the pantry, out of Mum’s earshot, and apologize for Mum’s rudeness.

She smiles broadly. “It’s okay,” she says. “Your mum, I know she has good heart. These things she says, she does not mean.”

“Look!” Mum calls from the kitchen, gasping for breath and stabbing a manicured fingernail at one of her newspaper flyers. “Sears is extending their Christmas sale—they’re practically
giving
things away! Let’s go look at sweaters.”

“Mum, you’ve already got three million sweaters upstairs.”

“I know,” she says, “but this is irresistible! It’s your birthday. Let’s just go … just for a few minutes.”

The lack of oxygen has turned her fingertips blue. I ask if she really has the energy for the shopping mall.

“I don’t think you understand,” she pants. “I can’t
stand
being cooped up here all day!”

I want to say
I don’t think
you
understand,
but I bite my tongue. I call to the pantry, “Pelmo? I’m taking Mum to Sears!”

After helping Mum switch to her portable oxygen supply, I collect her purse, sunglasses, and walker and we totter arm-in-arm towards the boathouse door. There are three steps we have to get down. Holding the door open with my shoulder, I lower first the walker, then her oxygen tank. Mum’s arms are outstretched like a figurehead on the bow of the
Titanic,
her hands clinging to the door frame, the tubing stretched taut from her nose to the tank on the ground. As she descends the steps she leans on me heavily, as if I’m a solid oak banister, and I wonder if the chiropractor can see me tomorrow. Mum is not thin.

“Just a minute … just a minute!” she shouts. “I need to catch my breath.”

We stand in the darkened garage for a few minutes. I stare at the tubing that connects us and think of umbilical cords.

“Breathe through your nose, Mum.”

“I am!”

While she inches her walker towards my car in the driveway, I trundle the oxygen tank in tandem. A few yards seem like hundreds of miles. Every few steps, she has to stop for breath. Getting Mum into the car is a whole other thing. She has to disengage from the walker and turn seat-first into the car, holding onto the car frame without getting tangled in the tubing. She’s exhausted. I’m exhausted. She heaves into the seat.

“Who made this car?” she shouts. “They ought to be shot!”

Now I lift the heavy tank with its metal wheels into the front seat with her. We must find space for it somehow, wedged
between her legs, because the tubing won’t reach her nose if I put it in the back. By now my patience is spent, so I slam her door a little too pointedly. I fold the walker and heave it into the back seat, cursing the flyer from Sears.
Hell,
I think,
they ought to be shot.

Driving raises my blood pressure up a notch. I haven’t bothered to strap Mum in. The seatbelt won’t fit over this explosive cargo and, surely to God, at some point does it really matter? As we approach each intersection, she leans forward, grips the dashboard, and shrieks, “It’s a stop sign!” or “It’s a red light!”

“I know, Mum,” I say calmly. “Breathe through your nose.”

“I am!”

At the mall I have to repeat all these steps in reverse. I unload the walker, the oxygen tank, and my mother, and guide all three to a bench inside. Then I trundle the walker back to the car and drive to find a parking spot. This is usually about three miles away. By the time I reunite with Mum, she’s anxious and worried.

“Where have you been?” she bleats.

“I had to park the car, Mum. And now I have to get a wheelchair.”

I’ve learned by now where the wheelchairs are—and they’re nowhere near Sears. At the kiosk the rental is free, but they take my car keys as hostage. Why can’t they take my mother instead? Then they hand me what looks like a heavy, Soviet-era wheelchair designed for midgets. It’s folded flat like origami and takes all my strength to spring it open. It has no holder for oxygen tanks, no basket for purchases. It has a flat leather pocket on the back, to hold what … my driver’s licence? I wheel it back to Mum on the bench.

She looks defeated. “I don’t think I have the energy,” she says.

“Energy for what, Mum?”

“For this!” she says angrily, waving at the wheelchair.

“This is a
wheelchair
!”

“I know that!” She glowers at me. “I
said
I don’t have the energy!”

“You want to go home, then?” I say this with a low, threatening growl. She considers it for a moment while I stare at the ceiling.

“No!”

“Well, breathe through your nose, then.”

“I am!”

“I’ll be pushing,” I say a little more gently. “You won’t have to do anything except sit there.”

The bright lights of Sears beckon at the other end of the mall and soon her excitement mounts. I bend like a pretzel to push her. Combined with the oxygen tank, I figure I’m pushing over two hundred pounds.

“Damn!” she says suddenly.

“What?”

“I don’t have my glasses.”

“You won’t need your glasses, Mum, I’ll read things for you.”

“Not my reading glasses!” she snaps, as if I’m an imbecile. “My
sunglasses
. The lights hurt my eyes!”

“Where are they?” I say, reaching for her purse.

“In the car! Where else would they be?”

I want to weep.

The car is locked. I can’t get my keys back unless I return the wheelchair. And I can’t return the wheelchair without taking Mum out and putting her back on the bench.

“That’s too bad, then,” I hiss. “Don’t look at the lights, look at Sears!”

We brush past the perfume counters. Clerks stand in the aisles aiming atomizers like guns to our heads. I shoot them back a withering look. We get to the sweaters. Clothes are crammed in disarray, left in heaps on the carpet, surrounded by discount signs. Mum perks right up.

“Stop here!” she barks. “Bring me that one!”

In amongst the depressing sea of muddy colours—navy, grey, maroon, and beige—Mum has expertly picked out a pretty fleece jacket in pale pink. It’s a sports model for joggers.

“Let’s get it!” she says.

“You sure?” It’s not even red.

“I’ll get a lot of use out of this!” She turns to me. “Don’t you think so?”

As I wheel her to the checkout counter, I wonder if the clerk can read Mum’s shopping history on her monitor. If so, she knows that after Christmas Mum will be bringing this back.

By the time we get home, Pelmo is back on duty, cooking dinner, so I keep my coat on and one foot out the door.

“I have to go now, Mum.”

“Oh, stay!” she pleads, suddenly smiling and clapping her hands. “Help me wrap presents!” As usual, Mum’s bought all her presents at garage sales throughout the summer and heaped them in a closet in the spare bedroom. I know what’s up there: sets of wooden salad bowls, out-of-date atlases, naked Barbie dolls, and books bought by the pound at the local library sale. There’s enough junk to fill every recycling bin in town.

“Can’t it wait?” I say, exasperated. “Christmas is still a month away.”

“In case I don’t live till Christmas.”

“Really, Mum! You can’t keep worrying about Christmas.”

“Well, I do—I might die!”

“Mum, every Christmas you say this, and every Christmas you’re
still here
! Are you going to wrap enough presents to leave behind for the next one hundred years?!”

She looks at me suspiciously. “Why do you have to rush off?”

“I’m not exactly rushing,” I say through gritted teeth, checking my watch. It’s dark outside and I’ve been here eight hours.

“Stay and have some supper—you have to eat
sometime
!”

“I have a date, Mum,” I lie.

“A date?” She looks surprised. “With who?”

“Nobody special.” How would I have the time or energy to add another relationship to my life? Since my divorce thirty years ago I’ve dated many men, but the thought of trying to blend yet another family into this one was always too exhausting to contemplate.

“When will I see you again?” she asks.

“I’ll be out on the weekend,” I say,
“just like always.”

Her mouth hardens into a tight, defensive line. “You make it sound like a fate worse than death.”

PART I

Endings

Mum’s Will

Mum never did return that pink jacket to Sears.

She died three weeks after Christmas.

Tonight we’re holding a Sibling Supper to read her last will and testament. The boys and I have been holding Sibling Suppers (no spouses allowed) to discuss Mum and Dad for almost twenty years. It’s allowed us to commiserate and strategize and conduct our own version of group therapy. Two or three times a year, Robin drives up from Virginia, Chris flies in from western Canada, and Victor and I book a good restaurant. We order filet mignon and the best bottle of wine and basically laugh all night.

Tonight’s Sibling Supper won’t be so funny. We all feel like we’ve been in a train wreck. Mum’s funeral a week earlier has left us feeling drained and stunned. Instead of booking a restaurant, we’re meeting at Victor’s home in Riverdale.

We navigate our cars through the darkened, snow-covered streets and climb carefully up the salted wooden steps to his narrow yellow-brick row house. We take off our boots and sling
our jackets over the coat tree inside the front hall. A cozy fire is lit in the living room to ward off the January chill. All the spouses know the rules, so, after drinks together, they go out and leave us to our business.

Six months before she died, Mum had leaned into my face with the steady pulse of her oxygen machine
pock-hissing
in the background and said, “Just think, as soon as I kick the bucket all your money troubles will be over!” She was thinking of her house. Mum figured its sale would put all of us on Easy Street, but what she didn’t know was that we’d recently mortgaged it. Years of round-the-clock caregivers for her and Dad had sucked the life out of their nest egg. We’d just hoped that, with Victor’s careful supervision of Mum’s financial affairs, what was left would see her through. Tonight we’re going to find out how close to the edge we came.

Our pecking order isn’t what you might think—it has nothing to do with birth order. It has to do with perceived competencies and long-assumed role expectations. For example, when Dad was alive I felt he was emotionally open to me, so if something delicate had to be presented to him, I volunteered for the job. Robin is the wise diplomat, so we turned to him for a considered opinion. He inherited Mum’s prodigious memory—mention something once and he never forgets it—so he’s also been our collective memory bank. Mum felt emotionally open to Chris, so if we ever wanted to gauge her reaction to a sensitive topic, we asked Chris to do it. Victor is the smartest with money, so he’s had power of attorney over Mum and Dad’s financial affairs. Besides, Victor is the only one who could have wrested Dad’s account books away from him, and he could stand up to Mum better than any of us.